medical athropology

The articles I’ve looked at so far in this series (Becker, in part 1, and Keel and Klump in part 2) give us some insight into the idea that the link between “Western” societies and eating disorders is more complex than a simple matter of media exposure. But, having read these studies, I was still left a bit wanting in terms of unpacking that black box of “culture” that gets tossed around in scholarly and popular literature. What, exactly, are we talking about when we talk culture in eating disorders?

Rebecca Lester, who is quite a prolific social anthropologist and who has written about eating disorder treatment systems in the USA and Mexico, makes the argument that “culture” is too often used as an umbrella term for semi-related but not-entirely-synonymous factors. This makes me wonder: is it possible that in latching on to the media side of Becker’s … Continue reading →

Definitioner

published by the American Psychiatric Association, offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders (11)

outcome

in a research study, a component of a participant's clinical and functional status after an intervention has been applied, that is used to assess the effectiveness of an intervention (2)

odds

a way of expressing the chance of an event, calculated by dividing the number of individuals in a sample who experienced the event by the number for whom it did not occur; for example, if in a sample of 100, 20 people died and 80 people survived the odds of death are 1:4 (2)